Over the weekend Nokia Deepfield published some initial analysis of the effects of Covid19 on service provider networks.
Years growth in days
There has been a massive growth in traffic of around 30%, which is what would be expected in a year.
Schools out for summer
Unsurprisingly, there has been a 300% growth in teleconferencing with everybody working at home. With the kids at home there has been a 400% growth in gaming.
Some stress at the edge
However, the networks are generally meeting demand. Issues seem to be at the edge in the aggregation networks and service edge routers. This is probably unsurprising, with the core network generally being massively scaled with a lot of headroom, whilst the access network with its higher cost likely to be much more optimally sized to the existing demand and known growth.
Time to value CSPs more.
Appledore have for some time looked at the economics of networks, and the potential for running networks hotter; matching the SDN network utilisation rates being touted by webscale players. Perhaps we should be thankful that the CSPs in sizing their network have been ultra cautious, giving us the headroom for this crisis. Just like “just in time manufacturing” over optimised networks can very quickly have problems, when the unexpected occurs. Maybe it’s time for all of us to value the CSP network that we pay for, and understand that not everything is free and reliable.